Graphics Cards Guide

Extremely Confusing

Extremely Confusing

XFX has never been shy about its products, from its bold and attention grabbing packaging to the aggressive overclocking, so we were rather laid back about the latest Extreme Edition GeForce 7900 GT from the vendor. After all, we thought that it's probably another overclocked GeForce 7900 GT. A quick glance at XFX's product lineup confirms this; the XFX GeForce 7900 GT Extreme Edition is not the most 'extreme' of its GeForce 7900 GT cards. The vendor has a more powerful version featuring faster clock speeds in its lineup. At the same time, there is also another version with a slightly milder overclock than the Extreme Edition. In short, it can be rather time consuming trying to figure them out, especially when they have similar names like "550M Xtreme" and "Extreme Edition". Our advice is to ignore the names and concentrate on the clock speeds, especially if you are buying from a third party retailer who may get the names wrong themselves.

So, what exactly is the model that's in our labs now? To put it simply, it's the XFX GeForce 7900 GT 256MB Extreme Edition. Core clock is at 520MHz, fast, but not the top overclock in XFX's stable and the memory chips are running at 1500MHz DDR. That is a useful15% boost for the core and 7% for the memory, so the performance figures later should be in that range. There is no VIVO on this card, which going by its appearance, is a standard reference card with XFX's decal on the cooler. The relatively compact cooler and the air-cooled 1.4ns rated memory chips are similar to the reference design while you can expect up to two dual-link DVI-I outputs supporting up to 2560 x 1600 displays. The XFX also did not attract any undue attention from us for its noise output was kept low and based on our fallible ears, it should be on par with other GeForce 7900 GT cards.

Previous graphics card bundles from XFX have rarely featured any of the typical applications like media players and content creation programs; games seem to be the obvious choice for the company due to its target audience of gamers and enthusiasts. Hence, it is no surprise that its XFX GeForce 7900 GT Extreme Edition does not come with a DVD playback application. What we got was a rather average game based on a movie, Starship Troopers that should nevertheless provide a few hours of mindless entertainment. The accessories luckily are quite complete, with two DVI-to-VGA adaptors, a dongle for HD Component and a S-Video extension cable. Overall, it is a decent enough bundle though adding a couple of applications would have been the icing.